My customer Aaron, was fed up with the poorly back-lit display on his black re-release SP-1200, and wanted to have the Noritake CU16025-UW6J display from Digi-Key fitted. They are expensive, and being glass, fragile; but they are bright and clear so a good upgrade.

Unfortunately the display is smaller than the aperture in the circuit board, and an attempt at notching out mountings was made to no avail. The display is also thicker than the original and spacers are needed to move it down. After several attempts I decided to make 3mm deep adapters on the 3D printer, and this gave me a stable mounting that I could squarely align the display on. You also have to make an adapter cable as the pins are reversed.

The next issue was that the display character area was smaller than the original, and it did not have a bezel. This looked bad, and the glass was exposed. Thankfully I had an 80×2 line lcd filter lens in my parts bin and could cut that to size. It covered the ugliness nicely, and protected the display. Aaron was happy! Final job was to open all switches and drum pads to clean them and restore playability.